Many products are packaged in flexible pouches or sealed bags or envelopes. Typically, these pouches are of a rectangular shape and contain food products such as seasonings, salad dressings, cereals, and candies. For example, a caesar salad kit includes a foil pouch of salad dressing, a cellophane pouch of croutons, a foil envelope of seasonings, all packaged in a cellophane bag of chopped romaine lettuce. However, each of these items must be hand sorted and manually placed within the cellophane bag for sealing. The reliance on manual labour increases food packaging time and costs.
There does not exist an automated machine which can separate and orient pouched product for insertion into a recipient container. The flexibility of the pouch prevents effective sorting and handling. As pouches are handled, they change shape and clump together making it difficult to separate the pouched products and then orient them so that they can be individually inserted into a recipient container.
There are prior art devices which separate and orient hard-surfaced objects such as wooden flat holder sticks or nuts and bolts. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,729,501 to Lowrance, provides an automatic feeder apparatus for automatically inserting flat holder sticks into individual food products such as ice cream bars and wieners. This device uses a series of agitator rollers having a plurality of circumferentially spaced longitudinal-shaped flutes. The series of rollers agitates the unaligned sticks and discharges the sticks onto a set of ramps to slide into a slot. This device would not be suitable for flexible items since the flexible items would tend to clump together and be delivered in bunches of two or more.